The History Blog

In 2000, a group of archaeologists and volunteers discovered some Iron Age pottery outside the village of Hallaton in Leicestershire, central England. A metal detectorist followed up in the area and found gold and silver coins. Further excavation revealed they had found one of the most important Iron Age sites in Britain, complete with 333 Roman coins, 5,296 British-made silver and gold coins, jewelry, ingots, thousands of pig bones, complete skeletons of three dogs and the pièce de résistance: an elaborately decorated Roman cavalry parade helmet that was buried around 43 A.D., the year of Claudius’ invasion of Britain.

The discoveries indicate that the site was a major Iron Age hilltop ritual enclosure, an important religious center for the local inhabitants, primarily the Corieltavi tribe. The pig bones were buried at various times during the 30s A.D., some of them remains of huge feasts while others were buried with the joints intact as a sacrifice to the gods. Because of the careful placement of the dogs’ remains, archaeologists believe the dogs were intentionally killed and buried to guard the shrine.

The valuables buried underscore the importance of the site. The hoard of Iron Age British coins is the largest ever found in Britain, comprising almost 10 percent of all extant British Iron Age coins. Among the 333 Roman coins found was the oldest Roman coin ever found in Britain: a silver denarius dating to around 211 B.C. It was buried by the Corieltavi in the 40s or 50s A.D. The images of Roma on the obverse and the Dioscuri (the twins Castor and Pollux) on the reverse are extremely worn, meaning that that denarius traveled far and wide for about 250 years before being put to rest in Leicestershire’s loam.

Then there’s the helmet. It was found in thousands of pieces, the metal so corroded archaeologists joked that they’d found a “rusty bucket” this time. The pieces were embedded in the mud; archaeologists had to remove the whole block of soil encased in plaster of Paris to get it to the conservation lab. There they discovered the rusty bucket was a silver-gilt iron cavalry parade helmet, the cheekpiece decorated with the figure of an emperor trampling a barbarian under the hooves of his horse while a winged victory holds a laurel wreath over his head.

It’s one of a very few Roman cavalry helmets ever found in Britain and one of the earliest. It’s also the only Roman helmet found in Britain with most of the silver plating surviving, even though it’s too corroded to shine anymore. This would have been owned by a cavalry officer of high status. There’s speculation that it could even have belonged to a Briton in the Roman army who buried it as a sacrifice, although of course there’s no way to know who owned it, who buried it and why.

A Heritage Lottery grant allowed British Museum conservators to piece it back together like a 3D puzzle. It took them ten years.

Metals conservation expert Marilyn Hockey began unearthing the fragments “out of a big lump of soil” at the British Museum three years ago.

She said: “Working our way down this enormous lump of clay, we discovered at the bottom some amazing finds … the Emperor cheek piece told us it was something really special. To get something straight out of the soil like this is like gold. You can find out so much from it.”

Jeremy Hill, head of research at the British Museum, said his “mouth dropped” when he saw the object pieced back together.

He said that the helmet had helped “change our understanding of what Britain was like just before the Roman conquest”.

He said: “Every book on the Roman conquest of Britain is going to have a picture of that helmet in it now.”

Next up for the Hallaton Helmet is permanent display at the Harborough Museum, just nine miles from where it was discovered, along with many other pieces of the Hallaton Treasure. For more details about the finds and tons more pictures, please see the Leicestershire County Council website. There’s video of the restored helmet here. For more about the conservation, see the British Museum blog.

In 1958 mountain climber and explorer Peter Byrne was in Nepal on the second year of a three year Yeti-seeking expedition funded by adventurer, philanthropist and oil millionaire Tom Slick Jr. In a Buddhist monastery in Pangboche, a small village in the Sola Khumbu region of the central Himalaya, Byrne learned from a temple lama that the monastery just happened to have the hand and skullcap of a Yeti. The custodian showed him a large, crusty, oily, blackened hand with curled fingers and long fingernails.

Byrne asked if he could have it but the lamas refused because its loss would lead to great misfortune for the monastery. Eventually he negotiated a bargain: he could take one of the fingers as long as he replaced with a reasonable facsimile and made a donation towards the upkeep of the temple.

Byrne cabled the information to Tom Slick Jr. and Slick had Byrne return to London to consult with primatologist Dr. Osman Hill. Slick, Byrne and Dr. Hill met for luncheon at the Regents Park Zoo. During a discussion of how they would secure an appropriate replacement finger, Hill upended his bag and dumped a dried human hand onto the table. Problem solved.

Byrne returned to Pangboche with his replacement hand and ten thousand rupees (about $160.00 at today’s exchange rate) to donate to the temple. He cut off the index finger from the Yeti hand and wired the human finger in its place. The next obstacle to overcome was the illegality of smuggling a historical artifact out of the country. So Byrne gave the Yeti finger to Jimmy Stewart to smuggle out of India in his wife’s lingerie case.

Yes that Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart was a personal friend of Tom Slick’s and just happened to be in India in December of 1958 on a tiger hunt. When Byrne got word to Slick that he had secured the Yeti finger, he cabled Byrne telling him to take it to the Grand Hotel in Calcutta where a Mr. and Mrs. Stewart would take custody of the article and smuggle it to Dr. Hill in London. They hid it in Gloria’s lingerie suitcase (rich ladies had dedicated suitcases for their unmentionables in those days). When they arrived, guess which bag was lost? Two days later a customs agent showed up at their hotel with the lingerie case in hand. Gloria asked if they had opened it and the customs agent assured her they would never paw through a lady’s delicates.

Thus the finger made its adventurous way to Dr. Osman Hill. He examined it and declared it the finger of a hominid of some kind, he couldn’t be sure of which kind. When Hill died in 1975, he bequeathed his collection of research specimens to the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum (the same museum where the Irish Giant’s bones are on display).

Hill’s collection wasn’t well catalogued and didn’t have immediate research value so it was stored and pretty much forgotten about until 2008 when curators going through the Hill collection found a box containing a plaster cast of a large footprint, some hair, scat samples and a large, blackened finger. Hill’s notes identified it as a Yeti finger from Pangboche Temple in Nepal.

Scientists have more tools than Hill did to determine just what creature once pointed that index finger, namely DNA analysis. The Royal College of Surgeons allowed a small sample to be taken to find out once and for all if it is a Yeti’s digit.

The finger is of human origin, according to Dr Rob Jones, senior scientist at the Zoological Society of Scotland.

“We have got a very, very strong match to a number of existing reference sequences on human DNA databases.

“It’s very similar to existing human sequences from China and that region of Asia but we don’t have enough resolution to be confident of a racial identification.”

BBC radio followed the story, interviewing Peter Byrne, now 85 years old and living in the United States. You can listen to the program here. There’s some discussion at the end of the broadcast about sending the finger back to Pangboche. The original hand was stolen in 1999 after a 1991 episode of Unsolved Mysteries analyzed a sample from the finger (results were inconclusive) and made the Pangboche monastery a newly popular location for cryptozoological tourism.

The income from tourism plummeted after the theft. Mike Allsop, an Air New Zealand pilot and Everest mountaineer, created a replica of the hand and skullcap to donate to the monastery in the hope that it would give them something to show tourists and perhaps inspire the return of the purloined Yeti parts. Getting the original finger back would mean a lot to the monastery.

The National Museum of Australia spent AUS$130,000 (hammer price AUS$111,000) to acquire a rare 1813 “holey dollar,” Australia’s first official minted currency, at the International Auction Galleries’ Australian & World Rare Coin auction on November 6th. There are only 300 or so holey dollars extant and this particular piece is one of only five which originated from Potosi, Bolivia. The rest are all Mexican silver.

The holey dollar was an ingenious solution to the severe shortage of coinage in the colony of New South Wales. Founded in 1788 by 1,487 British expatriates (778 of them convicts), the colony was so short on coin that rum was used as currency. The New South Wales Corps, the permanent local regiment that was supposed to maintain order, quickly became known as the Rum Corps due to their extra-legal control of the rum trade. In 1805 Governor William Bligh, the same William Bligh who had been captain of The Bounty until Fletcher Christian led a successful mutiny against him, tried to stop the Corps’ rum trade. The Corps responded with the Rum Rebellion of 1808, wherein William Bligh was forcibly deposed from yet another leadership position by underlings he could not control.

For the next two years the Corps ran the colony as they willed, until the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810. He was tasked with arresting the leaders of the Rum Rebellion and reclaiming political and military control of the colony from the New South Wales Corps. In 1812 the British government sent Macquarie £10,000 in Spanish dollars. Heavy in pure silver and worth eight reales, these Spanish pieces of eight had been used worldwide for currency since they were first struck in 1497. In Australia in 1812 their worth was fixed at five shillings.

Instead of releasing them into general circulation where they would be spent on goods arriving on merchant trade ships from all over the world and thus leave the colony almost as quickly as they arrived, Macquarie decided to solve the currency crisis by making these Spanish dollars a New South Wales currency. In keeping with his liberal policy of appointing emancipists (freed or pardoned convicts) to government jobs, Macquarie hired convicted counterfeiter William Henshall to punch holes in the Spanish dollars and overstamp both the outer pieces and the inner plugs (known as “dumps”) as NSW currency.

Macquarie provided Henshall with a workshop in the basement of a building known as ‘The Factory’ to make the holey dollars and dumps. This building, used by government printer George Howe, was near the corner of Bridge and Loftus streets, by the eastern bank of the Tank Stream. It was effectively Australia’s first mint, with Henshall Australia’s first mint master.

Macquarie initially anticipated that the task of converting the 40,000 Spanish coins would take three months, but the project took over a year to complete. Henshall had to experiment with making the necessary machinery, which proved difficult. It seems that a drop hammer, as opposed to a screw press, was used to stamp the coins. Henshall stamped the coins with their new value and ‘NEW SOUTH WALES 1813′. He incorporated his ‘H’ initial into the spray of leaves of the counterstamp design and also inscribed his initial between the words ‘FIFTEEN’ and ‘PENCE’ on the dump reverse dies.

(The dump pictured above left is from a holey dollar cast of out a 1773 piece of eight in the State Library of New South Wales).

This move doubled the number of coins in circulation, increased their worth by 25% and ensured that the money would not leave the colony. The holey dollars and dumps remained in circulation from 1814 to 1822, when the government was able to supply sufficient sterling coinage to recall the holey ones. By 1829, most of the 40,000 holey dollars had been exchanged for legal tender. The government melted them down for bullion. Only a few collectors kept the holey dollars and dumps, which is why there are only 300 of the former left and about 1000 dumps.

The National Museum’s holey dollar will probably go on display in the Landmarks: People and Places across Australia gallery in 2013, along with other artifacts from the Macquarie era.

A handsome but unassuming yew tree (Taxus baccata) near the mansion at Wakehurst Place, the Kew Botanical Garden’s country estate in West Sussex, turns out to be 620 years old. Twenty feet in diameter, it’s not the largest yew, never mind the largest tree, nor the most impressive (there are 100-year-old yews at Wakehurst that have grown up naturally on stones which are far splashier and more often painted/pictured/talked about than our medieval tree friend). Nobody at Wakehurst had any idea that particular yew was so ancient.

The tree was examined by a dendrochronologist as part of research for a long-term conservation management plan for the Wakehurst gardens. He took a core sample from the tree — you don’t need to cut the whole thing down to count its rings anymore — and found that the yew was planted in 1391, ten years after the Peasants’ Revolt and eight years before King Richard II was deposed.

Andy Jackson, the head of Wakehurst, said: “I am shocked and amazed. I thought I knew almost all there was to know about Wakehurst’s landscape, but it has unveiled a new layer to me. I’ve walked past this remarkably humble tree almost every day without realising just how old it is.

The yew is like an ancient key, unlocking information about the past and suggesting there was a much older designed landscape at Wakehurst that we didn’t know was there.”

The de Wakehurst family owned the land that would become the country estate starting in 1205. There’s a man-made terrace under the 1391 yew, so Jackson thinks the yew may be evidence of the earliest formal garden designed for the de Wakehursts. Last year archaeologists found remains of a 14th century house that was built near the current mansion (constructed in the 16th century) which is where the yew currently stands, so it may have been part of a line of landscaped trees planted to grace that first house.

(Sorry about the groaner in the title. I’m such a cheap date. )

The most ambitious digitization project I’ve ever heard of is halfway to its goal of putting every single publicly owned oil painting (plus tempera and acrylic) in the United Kingdom online. A joint effort of the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, Your Paintings now has 104,000 artworks by the likes of Degas and Rubens uploaded to the website out of an estimated 200,000. It’s the first national online art museum ever attempted. Just to give you a sense of the scale, there are only 3,000 paintings in the immense National Gallery.

You’d have to visit over 3,000 art galleries, museums, libraries, etc. to see the Your Paintings collection in person, and even that wouldn’t be enough. Some of the paintings are in private institutions like Bishop’s palaces and Oxford and Cambridge (they were deemed important national patrimony despite their technical private ownership) and aren’t on display. Even the ones in public museums are often in storage or being conserved. An estimated 80% of the 200,000 oil paintings in the national collection are not available for public viewing at any given time. Besides, even if you could access all of the paintings, it’s unlikely you’d get well-known actors and artists to take you on a guided tour of their favorite pieces and themes.

You can already search the website by artist, collection, location and thanks to the 5,000 members of the public (plus curators and experts) who have signed up to tag each painting with relevant subjects, soon you’ll be able to search the entire database by keyword as well. There are over a million tags already in the system. If you’d like to be a tagger too, sign up here.

If your interests lie more on the history of science spectrum, Cambridge University Library has digitized and uploaded 4,000 pages of works by Sir Isaac Newton, including a fully annotated copy of the Principia Mathematica, drafts of his book on optics, his college notebooks and the “Waste Book,” a large volume filled with Newton’s notes and calculations, including some important work in the development of calculus, that he used when he had to leave Cambridge during the Great Plague of 1664.

Each page has been scanned individually in high resolution. You can zoom in on the smallest detail, or you can zoom out and read the transcription of the sometimes challenging handwriting. (Not all pages have transcriptions.) You can also download images of every page.

The Cambridge Digital Library, in collaboration with the Newton Project at the University of Sussex, has been digitizing their Newton manuscripts since June 2010. They had to take their time with it because many of the works were in need of conservation before they could be scanned. These 4000 pages are just the beginning. Thousands more pages will be uploaded in the coming year. The ultimate goal is to have Cambridge’s full Newton collection online.

Once that’s done, they’ll move on to digitize their collection of works by Charles Darwin and the archive of the Board of Longitude.

Charles Byrne was an 18th century Irishman of extraordinary stature who became famous as “the Irish Giant” in London’s Cox’s Museum (a sideshow/museum of oddities similar to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City). Born in 1761, Byrne was already abnormally tall in childhood, and by the time he was a teenager his height had made him a popular local sideshow attraction. When he was 21, he left Ireland to seek fame and fortune in London. His 7’7″ height garnered him the giant gig at Cox’s Museum and he was instantly a huge hit. Unfortunately it was a short-lived success. Under the strain of his deteriorating health and the pressures of celebrity, barely more than a year after his move to London, the Irish Giant drank himself to death.

After a lifetime spent on display, Byrne’s deepest fear was that his body would be stolen by “resurrection men” in the employ of eminent Scottish anatomist John Hunter who was famous for his collection of anatomical specimens and oddities. Byrne told his friends that when he died he wanted to be sealed in a lead coffin and buried at sea to avoid this horror. One of those friends turned coat in the most despicable way: he became the resurrection man Byrne feared. Hunter paid him 500 pounds (almost $80,000 in today’s money) to steal the body when the burial party stopped overnight on their way to the English Channel. He put heavy stones in the casket and gave Hunter his friend’s body.

Hunter boiled it immediately, probably in fear of imminent discovery, and hid the skeleton for four years. Once he figured the coast was clear, he put the giant’s skeleton on display in his museum. After Hunter’s death, his collection was bought by the British government and became the core of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London which to this day has Charles Byrne’s body on display.

Professor of medical ethics Len Doyal and lawyer Thomas Muinzer argue in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal that it’s high time Charles’ wishes were respected and his remains buried at sea.

The fact is that Hunter knew of Byrne’s terror of him and ignored his wishes for the disposal of his body. What has been done cannot be undone but it can be morally rectified. Surely it is time to respect the memory and reputation of Byrne: the narrative of his life, including the circumstances surrounding his death.

The Hunterian Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons’ possession of Byrne’s skeleton may have led to beneficial medical outcomes. However, as a justification for not burying his skeleton, that case is no longer tenable. Past research on Byrne did not require the display of his skeleton; merely medical access to it. Moreover, now that Byrne’s DNA has been extracted, it can be used in further research. Equally, it is likely that if given the opportunity to make an informed choice, living people with acromegaly will leave their bodies to research or participate in it while alive, or both. Finally, for the purposes of public education, a synthetic archetypical model of an acromegalic skeleton could be made and displayed. Indeed, such skeletons are now used in medical education throughout the world.

The Royal College of Surgeons disagrees. Their position is that the skeleton is still a unique source of important medical research.

Dr. Sam Alberti, director of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “The Royal College of Surgeons believes that the value of Charles Byrne’s remains, to living and future communities, currently outweighs the benefits of carrying out Byrne’s apparent request to dispose of his remains at sea.

“A vivid example of the value of having access to the skeleton is the current research into Familial Isolated Pituitary Adenoma (FIPA).

“This genetically links Byrne to living communities, including individuals who have requested that the skeleton should remain on display in the museum.

“At the present time, the museum’s Trustees consider that the educational and research benefits merit retaining the remains.”

I can’t say I find the utilitarian argument tremendously persuasive. It seems to me Charles Byrne has given far more than his fair share of himself to science already. Time for what’s left of him to rest in peace and, for the first time, in privacy.

The Welsh government has taken a most beautiful payment in kind for an outstanding inheritance tax bill: an elaborately decorated 2000-year-old Celtic iron fire guard known as the Capel Garmon Firedog. The owners of the firedog had previously lent it to the Amgueddfa Cymru – the National Museum of Wales, who generously sent me the high resolution pictures included in this post that I couldn’t find anywhere else — where it was one of the most important artifacts in its exhibit of early Celtic art.

The Acceptance in Lieu (AIL) scheme allows owners to transfer “pre-eminent” heritage objects (works of art, archives, manuscripts) to public ownership as full or partial payment of their inheritance taxes. The Minister for Housing, Regeneration and Heritage approves the artifacts on the advice of independent experts and allocates them to a public museum.

The firedog was discovered in 1852 by a man digging a ditch in a peat field near the village Capel Garmon in county Conwy, north Wales. It appeared to have been buried deliberately, probably as an offering to the gods, as it was found intact deep in the peat, lying on its side with large stones placed at each end. This is in keeping with the well-established tradition of burying metal objects in lakes, rivers and bogs as a religious devotion in Iron Age Wales.

It certainly was not a commonplace object when it was first crafted between 50 B.C. and 50 A.D. (The date is an estimate based on comparisons with other firedogs found at chieftain burials. There was no archaeological excavation following its discovery in 1852, so we have no access to the original context where stratigraphic analysis or radiocarbon dating of nearby organic elements could give us a specific burial date.) It would originally have been one of a pair, used to hold logs or skewers on the central hearth of a chieftain’s round-house, an emblem of the chieftain’s wealth and power.

As part of an experiment to duplicate the firedog, conservators X-rayed it and found that it was made of 85 pieces shaped separately and then put together. Archaeologists estimate that the initial weight of iron used to make the twin firedogs was a staggering 38 kilos (84 pounds). The single firedog today is approximately 42 inches long, 30 inches high and weighs nine kilos (20 pounds).

Iron was hard to come by and very valuable. To use this much of it for a decorative (albeit practical) item must have been a prohibitively expensive proposition. The craft itself represents an enormous investment of time. Experts think it would have taken Iron Age blacksmiths perhaps as long as three years to create the firedogs, from gathering the ore, to smelting it through to crafting all the individual parts and then putting them together.

It’s no wonder the Minister approved this trade. For now, the Capel Garmon Firedog will remain on display in the Early Wales gallery of the National Museum in Cardiff. It will eventually be moved to new galleries currently still in the planning phase at St Fagans: National History Museum, another of seven national museums under the aegis of Amgueddfa Cymru.

Scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California together with digital conversion experts at the Library of Congress and curators of the work and industry division of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History have succeeded in playing some of the earliest experimental sound recordings by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell, his cousin Chicester Bell and their colleague Charles Sumner Tainter created a business called Volta Laboratory Associates dedicated to research and development of sound recording technology. Between 1881 and 1885, they studied and experimented with a number of recording technologies at their lab in Washington, D.C., recording sound on metal, rubber, glass and beeswax, among other media.

It was a heady time for inventors, with the likes of Bell, Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner all competing to unlock the key to playable sound recordings. To ensure they had evidence to support any contested patent application, the inventors stored recordings and research notes with the Smithsonian. The National Museum of American History thus has been the proud owner of 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made since the late 19th century. None of them were playable, however, so it was a collection of 400 silent audio recordings.

When Carlene Stephens, the curator in charge of the collection, read an article (which I blogged about at the time, oh yeah) about how the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had found a way to read the sound off an 1860 recording that was basically squiggles on paper, visions of 400 previously untastable sugar plums danced in her head. She set up a collaborative pilot program that would attempt to read six of Bell’s recordings use the new technology.

Advances in computer technology made it possible to play back the recordings, said Carl Haber, a senior scientist at the Berkeley Lab. He noted that 10 years ago specialists would have struggled with computer speeds and storage issues. The digital images that now can be processed into sound within minutes would have taken days to process a decade ago.

Many of the recordings are fragile, and until recently it had not been possible to listen to them without damaging the discs or cylinders.

So far, the sounds of six discs have been successfully recovered through the process, which creates a high-resolution digital map of the disc or cylinder. The map is processed to remove scratches and skips, and software reproduces the audio content to create a standard digital sound file.

For more technical details, pictures of the discs and most importantly, all six converted recordings, see the program’s website here. They’re very short audio tests, basically, like the first few verses of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy, random trills and countdowns. My favorite by far is the second “Mary Had a Little Lamb” recording which is interrupted by an “Oh no!” at the end. It’s the first recorded mistake! (That we’ve heard, anyway.)

We don’t know who the speakers are right now. They could be either Bell cousin, Tainter or someone else entirely. Researchers are hoping as they convert more and more of the Volta recordings they’ll be able to identify the voices. The pilot was funded by a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. The Smithsonian is working to secure more funding so they can make their whole audio archive speak for the first time.

Proving yet again that Britain is basically one giant buried treasure disguised by a thin layer of loam, another metal detector-wielding hobbyist has discovered a Viking hoard of 201 pieces of silver, including ingots, coins and arm rings, in a well-preserved lead container. It’s the fourth largest Viking hoard ever found.

Darren Webster found the hoard in September near the village of Silverdale in North Lancashire. When the metal detector his wife had given him for Christmas went off, he dug down 18 inches to find what turned out to be a lead pot. At first he thought it was just a sheet of lead, but when he picked it up silver fell out and he saw that the lead had been folded into a container. He reported the find to the authorities and the recovered hoard went to the British Museum for expert analysis.

Yesterday the British Museum unveiled the hoard to the press in anticipation of the coroner’s inquest to determine its treasure status next week. The final tally is 27 coins, 10 arm rings from various Viking periods, two rings (for fingers), 14 ingots, six brooch fragments, a wire braid and 141 pieces of hacksilver (chopped up bits of silver from arm rings and ingots that were used as bullion currency). The coins date the hoard to around 900 A.D. They are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Frankish and Islamic coins, including coins of Alfred the Great, first self-described King of the Anglo-Saxons, his nephew Alwaldus, the Viking king of East Anglia Guthrum (who was defeated in battle by Alfred, converted to Christianity, took the baptismal name Athelstan with Alfred as his godfather) and one mysterious Viking ruler previously unknown to us.

The mystery coin is inscribed “AIRDECONUT” on one side, and has the words DNS (for Dominus) and REX in the shape of the cross on the other. Experts believe “Airdeconut” is an Anglo-Saxon attempt to spell the Viking name Harthacnut, and the Dominus Rex indicate that Airdeconut was a Christian ruler. The style of the coin is similar to coins from the Viking kings of Northumbria around 900 A.D., but unlike those kings, Airdeconut/Harthacnut hasn’t appeared on the historical record before now.

Another featured player in the hoard is one of the arm rings. Arm rings were given to Viking warriors by their leaders both as rewards and as symbols of allegiance. This one is elaborately carved in a style that synthesizes Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Frankish decorative elements. Researching these unique features might help elucidate their origin and fill in the blanks in our knowledge of Viking trade networks and economy.

The Silverdale hoard has pieces in common with one of the famous Viking hoards ever discovered, the Cuerdale hoard, which was found just 60 miles away in 1840. It was a far larger find — 8,600 pieces of silver — but includes several of the same coin combinations. The coins dated the Cuerdale hoard to around 905-10 AD, which supports the dating of the Silverdale hoard’s burial to around that time or a little earlier.

At this time Anglo-Saxon forces were fighting the Vikings, who had settled in the area, converted to Christianity and become farmers and traders in the generations since the Norsemen first invaded, for control of the north of England. The hoard was probably buried by a Viking settler/warrior to keep it safe from pillaging while he was off fighting.

Once the inquest determines that the hoard is treasure according to the Treasure Act (and it’s a given that it will because of the silver and its age), the experts will assess its market value. Institutions can then secure the hoard by paying the finder and the property owner the assessed value. The Museum of Lancaster is hoping they’ll be able to raise the funds and secure the hoard for display.

The Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at London’s National Gallery which stars seven of the 15 paintings by Leonardo da Vinci known to have survived, including the recently rediscovered Salvator Mundi, has been a blockbuster of epic proportions. Tickets sold out for the entire run almost immediately and are currently being scalped on eBay for hundreds of dollars apiece.

The vast majority of the world won’t have the chance to see the exhibit in person during its all-too-short run (it opened November 9, 2011, and closes February 5, 2012) and the paintings are so fragile and, in some cases, politically fraught — it took an enormous diplomatic effort to get them all together in the first place — that there will no travelling exhibit. Once the show closes the first week of February, that will be the end of it. We’ll probably never see those pieces together again during our lifetimes.

Be not forlorn, though, because we will at least get to see some killer HD footage of the exhibit, accompanied by commentary from curators, da Vinci experts, and, randomly, actress Fiona Shaw fresh off her stint as a dissociative witch with an atrociously fake Southern accent on True Blood. (Loved her in Persuasion, though.)

Billed as the first-ever tour of a fine art exhibition created for movie theatre audiences, “Leonardo Live” will afford art lovers a two-dimensional look via satellite at the sold-out exhibition, which cannot tour due to the works’ fragility.

Beginning February 16 2012, the da Vinci film will be screened in U.S. venues as well as in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and Sweden, roughly through the end of the month.

The exhibition, which has drawn crowds and seen tickets scalped for hundreds of dollars each, was filmed on the eve of its opening in London this fall. The 100-minute production provides a high-definition walk-through of the landmark show, in-depth commentary about featured pieces and extra content.

There is no list of scheduled showings yet, so if you want to receive email updates on when you can catch the movie in your area, sign up on the Leonardo Live HD website.

In unrelated Leonardo news, Italian police raided the Palazzo Vecchio yesterday after 400 art scholars from around the world signed a petition asking them to intervene to stop Maurizio Seracini — the only living non-fictional person to make an appearance in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code — from drilling holes in a Vasari fresco to find a Leonardo fresco he thinks might lie behind it.

It wasn’t much of a raid; the carabinieri questioned the team in the Salone dei Cinquecento and that was pretty much it. The aim of the investigation is to determine how this drilling plan was hatched (like, for instance, if National Geographic’s funding of the project in exchange for exclusive rights to broadcast any results might have placed undue pressure on the team to find something, anything, even at the cost of the Vasari) and whether the Vasari fresco was damaged or if there’s a risk that it will be damaged.